Western Mass. legislators briefed on high-speed broadband Internet

BOSTON — Access to high-speed, broadband internet, taken for granted in Boston and most of Eastern Massachusetts, has proven elusive for dozens of Western and Central Massachusetts cities and towns, from Princeton, just two towns away from Worcester, to Richmond, where Gov. Deval Patrick makes his weekend home.

But state officials hope that will change by 2013.

The Massachusetts Broadband Institute, established in a $40 million bond bill in 2008 to extend broadband service to communities with limited access or no access at all, on Wednesday outlined a plan to build 1,338 miles of broadband infrastructure across 120 western and central Massachusetts communities in the next two years.

"We're really excited about it," said Rep. Stephen Kulik (D-Worthington), vice chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, at a State House briefing. "We're really on the cusp right now of making a major leap forward in making universal broadband service available throughout Massachusetts."

Dubbed MassBroadband 123, the new connections are expected to serve 335,000 households, 44,000 businesses and wire 1,400 police departments, schools, libraries, hospitals and town halls at a cost of $71.6 million. Most of the communities have low population density and challenging terrain that has discouraged private companies from building broadband infrastructure, according to the institute.

Broadband Institute Director Judith Dumont said the eight-person agency has leveraged $83.5 million in federal funds to supplement its own $40 million budget.

Dumont said work on the initiative had already begun with a $4.7 million fiberoptic "backbone" constructed along I-91, from the Connecticut border in Longmeadow to the Vermont border in Bernardston.

According to documents provided by the institute, Jacobs Engineering Company is currently evaluating the potential environmental impact of the broadband expansion to ensure the project complies with state and federal laws - a key step before the project can advance. The project includes linking fiberoptic cables to more than 30,000 existing utility poles.

Dumont said the agency has had daily calls with industry officials and contractors to "keep their feet to the fire" and "expedite the process."

"They know that any slip, we're going to be on them," she said. "There's no magic bullet. There are a certain number of days that they have to do each step. Then there's dispute resolution at the Department of Telecom and Cable. Nobody wants to go there."

The agency also intends to spend $5 million to wire Cape Cod through an initiative called OpenCape, $5 million on its own operations, and $200,000 to map state broadband availability. The mapping project leveraged $6.1 million in federal funds to help promote the adoption of broadband by residents who have access but haven't yet signed up.

"The mission is simple. Connect the unconnected," Dumont said.

Dumont described a "race across the country" for cell phone providers to link their towers to fiberoptic networks.

"The cell companies cannot implement their fourth-generation technology through their existing copper infrastructure," she said.